In recent years more people are becoming aware of the environmental and financial benefits of using renewable building materials as a way of preserving and managing cost and sustaining modern lifestyles. Although not used extensively in the United States, bamboo has many advantages over traditional lumber including ease and speed of growth and strength. As a member of the grass family, it grows relatively fast, especially when compared to the more traditional timber used in the United States. Bamboo has been used for a very long time in Asian countries and is slowly making its way into the Western markets.
Bamboo, unlike traditional timber is mostly hollow and therefore harvesting techniques long used to maximize the yield from forest trees used by the lumber industry does not work very well with bamboo. In many Asian countries, because of their long history of building with bamboo, the bamboo is used without the need to change its basic structure other than simple splitting. Western building techniques rely on techniques that have been developed using lumber and this is a bar to using bamboo to its fullest extent. There is a need to fully utilize bamboo while making it suitable as a building material amenable to Western building techniques.